Democrats Say U.S. Is Better Off Than Four Years Ago

A day after fumbling a predictable and straightforward question posed by Mitt Romney last week — are Americans better off than they were four years ago — the Obama campaign provided a response on Monday that it said would be hammered home during the Democratic convention here this week: “Absolutely.” The focus on the campaign’s handling of the question, after halting and contradictory responses from Democrats on Sunday, complicated the White House’s effort to begin striking a set of themes the president intends to highlight here and carry through the general election. That effort starts with an argument that Mr. Romney, the Republican nominee, would raise taxes on the middle class while cutting them for the wealthy. It seeks to pitch forward to the next four years the case that Mr. Obama and his allies have made over the spring and summer — that Mr. Romney’s business career showed him intent on profit even at the expense of workers and that his wealth has given him tax advantages not enjoyed by regular people. “The problem is everybody’s already seen his economic playbook,” Mr. Obama said at a campaign stop in Ohio before a Labor Day audience largely consisting of United Auto Workers union members. “On first down he hikes taxes by nearly $2,000 on the average family with kids in order to pay for a massive tax cut for multimillionaires.” The Obama campaign began running a new commercial making the same point, and asserting, “The middle class is carrying a heavy load in America, but Romney doesn’t see it.” As delegates streamed in for the opening of the convention on Tuesday, Mr. Obama and his team were putting the finishing touches on a program that requires a different kind of political daring from the one they showed four years ago, when Mr. Obama gave his speech in a stadium on a stage compared by some to a Greek temple. This week Mr. Obama is planning to undertake a tricky two-step of convincing wavering supporters being aggressively courted by Mr. Romney that they made the right decision in choosing him four years ago and that he has the country on its way to a sustainable recovery even if they do not always feel it. He will make the argument in an outdoor stadium again, on Thursday night under the threat of rain, but aides say there will be no Greek columns. Obama campaign aides indicated they were moving into a new phase, applying their case that Mr. Romney has no history of looking out for the middle class to the question of what the next four years would look like under a Romney presidency. But Republicans showed that they were not going to give Mr. Obama a free ride this week, with Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, coming to North Carolina to keep the focus on the last four years. “The president can say a lot of things, and he will, but he can’t tell you that you’re better off,” Mr. Ryan said on Monday at a rally in Greenville, N.C. “Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now.” Mr. Obama’s aides initially appeared to stumble when television interviewers asked them to respond to Mr. Romney’s charge in his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night that Americans were not better off under Mr. Obama. On Fox News Channel, Mr. Obama’s top strategist, David Axelrod, said, “We’re in a better position than we were four years ago in our economy.” But Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, a Democrat, answered “no” on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” though he blamed Republicans. Other aides equivocated. Mr. O’Malley provided another answer on Monday on CNN: “We are clearly better off as a country because we’re creating jobs rather than losing them. We have not recovered all that we lost in the Bush recession. That’s why we need to continue to move forward.” In fact, on Monday the campaign settled on a definitive answer of, as the deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter put it, “Absolutely.” Followed down a hallway by a local news crew asking the “better off” question in the convention center here, Ms. Cutter described the economic scene four years ago — the auto companies teetering near bankruptcy, bank failures — and said, “Does anyone want to go back to 2008? I don’t think so.” Speaking in Detroit on Monday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said during a union rally, “You want to know whether we’re better off?” He answered: “I’ve got a little bumper sticker for you: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” Aides said that over the next three days they would show video testimonials of people who have been helped by Mr. Obama’s policies, hammering home the success of his auto bailout and the benefits of his health care overhaul. “We’re not running from our record, which we’re proud of,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. But, he added, “We’re also going to burnish the choice — it’s fair to say there will be more discussion of their ideas at our convention than there was at theirs.” While Democrats pointed to polls showing that Mr. Romney appeared to get little polling “bounce” out of his convention, some Democratic strategists here conceded that Republicans had succeeded in muddying the waters on a traditional Democratic strong point, Medicare. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan support a plan that would change the program into one in which beneficiaries would get a fixed amount of money from the government each year to use to purchase private health insurance or traditional Medicare, a shift that Democrats say would leave the elderly vulnerable to rising health care costs. Many Democrats had assumed the issue would be a major political help to them, but some Democratic strategists said Republican claims that Mr. Obama had cut $716 billion from the program had at least partly neutralized the Democratic advantage and constrained their ability to emphasize Medicare in their campaign message. In a brief interview, the minority leader in the House, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, seemed to acknowledge as much when she said of Republicans, “Confusion is the name of their game,” though she added that the Democrats could regain the advantage. “We don’t agonize over that, so we’re organized to make sure the truth is known by the public.” Democrats here expressed relief that Mr. Obama took some potentially contentious issues out of the intraparty debate here — supporting gay marriage, ending the military policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and easing the threat of deportation for many young immigrants in the country illegally — and those were expected to be highlighted here, as well. Produced by the same team that put on Mr. Obama’s last convention — the strategists Jim Margolis and Erik Smith — the program this week will include a video version of Mr. Obama’s logo, now overlaid with silhouettes of people, which loomed over the empty Time Warner Cable Arena on Monday. The theme emblazoned on the hall is “Americans Coming Together.” In a nod to austerity, there will be no band, but, rather, a DJ — more specifically, Deejay Cassidy, a favorite of the Obamas. Where the main priority for Mr. Obama’s team four years ago was to prove he could be president, this year it is to show that he is connected to the middle class. So, organizers said, the stages in the arena and the Bank of America Stadium, where Mr. Obama speaks Thursday night, will be smaller and “intimate,” allowing speakers “to be surrounded by delegates,” Theo LeCompte, the chief operations officer of the convention, said in a statement. But this convention will be less about stagecraft than about the argument Mr. Obama will make to woo back straying supporters and recast his presidency in a light of accomplishment amid often gloomy monthly job reports. The next report is to come out Friday, less than 10 hours after Mr. Obama finishes speaking.